A few days ago, I’ve bought an album on Amazon Music (Ramones - Essential), because I had some promotional credit from some previous purchases. The album is available in mp3 format, which is completely fine with me, the quality is usually good enough for me.
When you buy music from Amazon, it’s automatically added to your Amazon Cloud Player, which you can also use to upload your existing music library (with a limit of 250 songs for the free version, or 250000 when buying an upgrade). But I wanted to download the songs, to put them on my iPod, and to upload them to my Google Music account.
To download music from your Amazon account, you have 2 choices: either install the Amazon MP3 Downloader, which is a client dedicated to downloading songs, or use the Cloud Player. And that’s where it becomes a problem: the MP3 Downloader is only available for Windows or OSX. And the web-based Cloud Player can only be used to download songs one at a time. Which means that, to download a 20 songs album, I had to click 79 times on the page (for each song, select the song, click on the Download link, click on Save, and unselect the song). Just for 1 album, 79 clicks! It really is a massive pain.
When you want to download music from your Google Music account, you download and install the Music Manager, available for Windows, Linux and Mac (not available for all Linux distributions, but the main ones). And that’s it. Download an album: 2 clicks. Upload an album: 2 clicks.
Amazon, why don’t you create a Linux client? Because until you do, I won’t buy any more music from you. Even if it seems to be more expensive on Google Music, it’s so much simpler that I can make an effort.
To all of you, big companies who could easily hire some people to develop a good Linux client, do it! The Linux community may not be the majority of your users, but I think they have a good visibility on Internet, and (at least in my case), we won’t hesitate to complain.